Television as a medium is growing and changing at a rapid pace these days. Never before have we been presented with so many choices. Digital cable has allowed for more channels in the same space and the Internet is increasing the video content available exponentially. What is needed is a way to organize all this new media that is available to us so we are not overwhelmed by the vast amount of choices. Methods currently being used in the Web 2.0 sphere to organize products/websites/music/etc. can be applied to television watching to give us a more personalized and meaningful experience. My idea is to create an Ambient TV system that will be utilize some of these Web 2.0 tools that have emerged such as collaborative filtering and aspects of social networking and apply them to the traditional medium of television viewing. My goal is to show how TV can evolve and merge with the new technologies and provide a new, customized viewing experience.

I came up with the idea of Ambient TV while writing a paper for my Producing Participatory Media class. I started thinking about what my vision of the future of TV would look like. I don’t believe that the consumers themselves will hand select all media or that the big TV networks will die and the consumers will produce all media. I do believe that more media will be sought out purposefully, but I’m not sure I believe that this will become the sole method of choosing what to watch. And while I do believe that more media will be produced by the masses, I also believe there will always be a place for commercially produced media.The user would be presented with a stream of video that is selected based on viewing habits. Instead of having stations like ABC, NBC, MTV, etc; you would have ‘personalized’ stations. These stations could be based of the particular user (mom, dad, teenage daughter) and the shows they select to watch, or based on genre (comedy, crime drama, cooking shows). I imagine it like an internet streaming radio station, but where you have the ability to fast forward through the shows that you don't want to watch (much like channel flipping). No more "1000 channels and nothing on". My vision will have a limited set of channels, but that limited set is personalized by each user.

LastFM
Democracy Viewer
Amazon Unbox and Tivo
"The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson in Wired magazine in October 2004
Shelly Palmer's Television Disrupted
TV Week, March 5, 2007 Viewership Moves Out of Living Room

For my thesis, I intend to create a design document describing my ambient TV system along with a rigged prototype demonstrating its key features. The prototype will be made using Flash, PHP, mySQL and XML.